Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (3 page)

We are grateful to Giuliano Delia Casa for having accepted the invitation to illustrate the present edition of
Science in the Kitchen
, which resurrects (with revisions) the only adequate English translation of the book.
¹⁵

The many incarnations of Artusi’s book are another sign of the role it has played in the history of modern Italy, both as an incentive to retrieve its centuries-old gastronomic tradition and as a binding factor in the shaping of a culturally grounded national unity. While the two issues are tightly connected, the former comes equipped with a curious corollary: the ancient
diaphorà
between France and Italy in their quest for gastronomic primacy. Coming as it did at a time “of transition, listlessness, and decadence in Italian cuisine, which was on one hand entirely regional, and on the other entirely French (the menus at court, the menus at official banquets … were French in both form and substance), the linguistic and culinary purism endorsed by this book filled a void in the Italian national consciousness that a reawakening of rancor and animosity toward ‘our scantily benevolent neighbors,’ the French, had rendered more acute.”
¹⁶

Victor Emmanuel II, Italy’s first king, was himself a great lover of French food, and when Florence became the temporary capital of the nation and he took up residence there (1865–71), Florentines immediately noticed how he much preferred “French” butter to their “superior” Tuscan oil. Artusi’s pages, written in Florence during those years and printed there some twenty years later, showed not only that French and Italian culinary traditions ought to be viewed as parallel experiences, but that the common Renaissance denominator they shared, thanks to Catherine de’ Medici, patron saint of both Italian and French cuisine, was perhaps more “common” on the southern side of the Alps than in the land of the Sun King.

Florence was indeed a good spot from which to observe the curious reentry into Italy of recipes (with French names) that Catherine
herself, granddaughter of Lorenzo il Magnifico, had first exported to Paris in 1533, when she was married off by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, to Henry of Orléans, who would eventually be crowned king of France. Thus
crespelle
, a quintessential Tuscan dish, returned as
crêpes suzette; colletta
, which dates back to the times of ancient Rome, came back as
béchamel
(after Monsieur de Béchamel, who claimed it as his own invention).

When on 10 November 1878 King Umberto I (son of Victor Emmanuel) and his queen Margherita paid an official visit to Florence – the pope had finally relinquished his grip on Rome, which in 1871 had become the latest capital of the new nation – the mayor offered a banquet that did not include a single Florentine dish. The menu read as follows: “
Potage à la regence – Croutades à la Saint Cloud – Crêpes Villeroy
–
Ombrine garnie sauce normande – Filet de boeuf à la diplomate – Poulardes à l’impératrice – Domenicains de bécasses à l’ancienne
–
Artichauts et haricots verts à l’hollandaise – Punch au Kirschwasser
–
Rot de dindes et de perdreaux
–
Salade trouffée
–
Suprème de profiteroles à l’écossaise – Dessert de glace crème et chocolat – Abricot à l’Allemande
” And not a drop of Chianti or Trebbiano. In their stead: “
Chateau d’Yquem, Chateau Larose
,” and “
Johannisberg
.”
¹⁷
It was enough to make Artusi turn green.

Centuries of domination by various foreign powers and the precipitous series of military campaigns and annexations that made up the
Risorgimento
had resulted in the imposition of a set of national tasks and responsibilities on people who did not even share a language (excluding the literary Italian written and read, and not necessarily spoken, by the small number of citizens who had access to books).
¹⁸
From this perspective, the reclaiming of recipes, and the gastronomic ingenuity to which they bear witness, had to be motivated, at least in part, by the desire to see the newly established nation “off to a good start” in an area where the settling of disputes, and the implementation of historical justice, required, for a change, no shedding of human blood. An unprejudiced application of gastronomic philology was a prerequisite to transforming the game of claiming and reclaiming into
the infinitely more rewarding intellectual pursuit of testing the validity of paradigms connecting individuals in adjacent or partially overlapping societies. This meant not simply transcending shortsighted nationalistic politics, which all too often concealed malevolent exploits with self-aggrandizing eloquence, but enabling local cultures to play an international role, both real and symbolic, without having to be first subsumed by a national, often stultifying and frequently artificial, configuration. The incipient habit of eating out, adopted by many fin-de-siècle gentlemen (and a few daring ladies), and the curiosity elicited by the multi-regional menus of many restaurants, also helped bring about whatever cohesiveness Italy could boast in the second half of the nineteenth century.

It has also been observed that Artusi’s book, read over and over again at home,
¹⁹
was much more effective in bringing about a modicum of social harmony than were the heavily ideological and frequently high-brow novels – chief among them Alessandro Manzoni’s
I promessi sposi
(The betrothed) – that thousands of young men and women were forced to read in school, in the vain hope that this exercise would transform them from the young Sicilians, Venetians, or Romans that they and their forebears had been into young Italians. Unlike those novels, which emphasized uniformity, Artusi showed how the preservation of diversity does not contradict collective interests. It is perhaps this validation of diversity operating within the boundaries of a nation both ancient and newly established that gave the book its most genuine political value.

In his article “Artusi,” Folco Portinari cautions against this assumption, first suggested by Camporesi, arguing that well over half a century of Manzonian “popularity” had preceded even the first glimpse of
Scienza in cucina
. Portinari does recognize, however, that the comparison of Manzoni and Artusi promoted an interest in Artusi’s project “to elaborate a national culinary koine with which all Italians could specifically identify, from the Po River to Mount Aetna.”
²⁰
Whether such a project ought to be considered absurd, as Portinari seems inclined to believe, given the fundamental vernacular quality of Italian
cooking, or whether Artusi’s stubbornness in pursuing it wins out in the end, the gastronome’s contribution to the devolopment of the recipe as a literary genre is generally acknowledged. We shall return to this topic later.

Let us just add here that even Artusi’s much celebrated sense of humor falls far short of Manzoni’s superbly euphemistic style. Nor would Artusi have presumed to make any claim to the contrary. As an example of the distance separating the two, compare his musings on the dishonesty of Florentine butchers (who “call both yearlings and any bovine animal about two years old a ‘calf.’ But if these animals could speak they would tell you not only that they are no longer calves, but that they have already had a mate and a few offspring as well”)
²¹
with Manzoni’s reflections on the great prestige the town of Lecco derives from the mere fact of housing “a garrison commander, and … a permanent force of Spanish soldiers, who gave lessons in modest deportment to the girls and women of the area, and who tickled the back of the odd husband of father with a stick from time to time. They also never failed, at the end of summer, to spread out across the vineyards and thin out the grapes, so as to lighten the labours of the peasants at harvest-time.”
²²

Doubtless the claims of gastronomic originality surfacing here and there in Artusi’s text are to be taken with a grain of salt and measured against the backdrop of a political unification that, contrary to the tranquilizing reassurances of official propaganda, seemed ensnared in complications so severe that the wisdom of the venture itself was being seriously called into question. Significantly, in
Scienza in cucina
, the philological, and archaeological, reconfiguration of the Italian (and, consequently, the European) culinary map was masterfully accompanied by the tribute Artusi paid to topical peculiarities: while it is true that Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany emerge from these pages as areas of gastronomic excellence, all of the regions of Italy are given their due.

At the end of the nineteenth century, debate raged between proponents of regional autonomy and those who claimed the necessity of a
centralized bureaucracy no matter how detrimental to thriving cities such as Milan, Trieste, and Naples. Furthermore, rightist governments endorsed socio-economic policies inspired by the principle that capital had to be protected at all costs, even when it meant using public money to bail out private entrepreneurial incompetence. If the forces for increasing centralization of state administration appeared to be winning the day, Artusi’s book, with its embrace of local diversity, seemed to be some sort of consolation prize for the proponents of regionalism. No one could seriously argue against the fairness of the author’s selections and preferences, and most felt gratified to find in the table of contents a sufficient number of dishes from cultures whose peculiarity (often deeply rooted in childhood memories) did not constitute an impediment to the solution of national political and social issues.

Although perhaps less evident than the claim of originality and the preservation of topical differences, a third factor ought be considered in attempting to explain the book’s slow but unfaltering success: the presence, in this guide to “Italian” cooking, of a fair number of “foreign” recipes, mostly English, French, and German.
²³
Given the historical time-frame, this “contamination” may be read as a sign of self-assurance, the relevance of which should not be underestimated. A propos of
piccioni all’inglese
(squabs English style, or squab pie; recipe 277) Artusi proclaims: “I would like to make it clear once and for all that names do not mean much in my kitchen, and that I give no importance to high-sounding titles. If an Englishman should tell me that I have not made this dish, which also goes by the odd name of ‘piccion paio,’ according to the customs of his country, I do not care a fig.”
²⁴

Such boldness seems consistent with a lexicological observation made by Niccolò Machiavelli, at a much earlier date, in his
Dialogo intorno alia nostra lingua
(Dialogue on the Italian language): “Languages cannot be pure. They must be mixed with other languages. A language will be called national that can turn to its own use terms gleaned from other languages. And those terms will not disrupt it, because it is so powerful that it will disrupt them. Such a language
garners these terms in such a way that they will appear to have belonged to it all along.”
²⁵
Inviting the allogeneous to penetrate the indigeneous without fearing any loss of identity – and actually presuming that, in the process of assimilation, the latter will metabolize the former to become stronger – bespeaks a confidence that only a solid, fertile tradition can foster. Indeed, this was the case with Machiavelli, who could look back at a linguistic development sustained by an amazingly powerful and uninterrupted literary flowering: Stil Nuovo, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lorenzo, Politian, Sannazzaro, and so on. In Artusi’s field, finding predecessors and forebears may have seemed a considerably more laborious task. But a solid, fertile Italian gastronomic tradition had existed, and it was still available to anyone with enough patience and curiosity to look for it. And these were two qualities Pellegrino Artusi possessed in the highest degree.

Furthermore, in this quest for Italy’s gastronomic roots and traditions, Artusi was not alone. Four years prior to the publication of
Scienza in cucina
, his Bolognese friend, the noted poet Olindo Guerrini,
²⁶
had unearthed and published with Zanichelli
Frammento di un libro di cucina del sec. XIV
(Fragment of a fourteenth-century cookery book). In 1890, the same publisher had brought forth
Ricette di cucina del buon secolo della lingua
(Recipes from the golden century of the language), edited by Salomone Morpurgo. One year earlier, in Livorno, Ludovico Frati had produced
Libro di cucina del secolo XIV
(A fourteenth-century cookery book), and back in 1863 – Artusi was in his forties – G. Romagnoli, another Bolognese press, had issued Francesco Zambrini’s edition of
Libro della cucina del secolo XIV
. These texts, long buried on the shelves of inaccessible libraries, brought to light for the first time the early tangible signs of a gastronomic culture that would peak in the mature decades of the Renaissance. They, and others older still, are, in the words of Massimo Montanari, “the point of arrival of the long evolution by which, little by little, medieval cuisine had become distinct from the Roman-based cuisine of antiquity. In great part, it was an international cuisine,” but it was already “possible to identify in it national and even regional
characteristics … To begin with, ‘southern’ cuisine seemed to be clearly definable by the use of oil, ‘northern’ cuisine by the prevalence of animal fats.”
²⁷

The task of mapping in detail the gastronomic literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and ensuing centuries leading up to Artusi exceeds both my aspiration and the scope of this essay. As the identification of a few stepping stones cannot be avoided, however, let us begin by underlining the enormous influence exercised by the humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Plàtina, whose
De honesta voluptate atque valetudine
(On right pleasure and good health) was not simply the first cookbook ever printed (Rome, 1474), but also the first to be translated from the Latin original into French and German (and Italian, in 1487), facilitating a vast, unprecedented understanding of the dignity of both the culinary art and the writerly discipline focusing on it.